The Divi theme, developed by Elegant Themes, is one of the most widely used WordPress themes today. It’s perfectly suited for e-commerce sites, business showcase sites and… virtually any other type of site. In this article, we’ll cover all the positives and the downsides of this theme.
Introduction to the Divi theme
Today, website creation is faster and easier than ever — largely thanks to CMS platforms and no-code or low-code tools. Following that logic, using a WordPress theme makes it even simpler to build a site without any programming knowledge. Divi answers this perfectly: it’s very easy to use for beginners and extremely interesting for experts. It’s powerful and allows you to build stunning websites. However, it’s not perfect — yes, you already know that — but perfection doesn’t exist.
At first glance, after activating Divi on your site, the default design may not seem very exciting. But don’t worry — it’s absolutely possible to create something exceptionally high quality, and you can download one of its free templates to start with a beautiful foundation.
The downsides of Divi
- To begin with, the Divi theme has no free version. However, if you want to try its page builders for free, .
- Divi’s performance is not great. Even though the developers do their best and it improves each year, Divi is a heavy theme. Add a few unoptimized plugins on top of shared hosting and your site will become unusable — for you and your users alike.
- It is very accessible. Unfortunately, if you don’t understand what’s happening in the background every time you add something new, you’ll quickly increase your page load times. It also has multiple settings that achieve the same thing — which, without domain knowledge, means even more unnecessary weight on your pages. I should note this applies to most themes — which is why it’s important to work with a specialized WordPress freelancer as early as possible to avoid building on a poor foundation.
- The French translation is not great (minor issue for English users).
- It has a huge number of features that are generally unnecessary — it’s easy to get lost and add unnecessary weight to your WordPress for no benefit. For example, Divi’s built-in SEO settings may conflict with your dedicated SEO plugin.
The advantages of Divi
- Divi is the best value-for-money theme on the market. Including both a theme and a visual builder, for around €210 you get lifetime access for an unlimited number of sites.
- When you’re starting out without much knowledge, you’ll inevitably search the web to figure out how to do each little thing. Fortunately, you’ll almost always find a solution thanks to the massive Divi community!
- You can “do anything” with Divi. Its flexibility, customizations, and the ability to write your own code per page, per footer, per menu, per module — you name it. You can build whatever you want.
- Divi is, in my view, the most UX-friendly (user experience) theme/page builder on the market. Perfect for beginners.
- Lots of templates — all free and very well designed.
- No need to install a separate page builder plugin or juggle Astra + Elementor. Divi handles everything for customizing your site’s visuals.
- You can export pages as .json and import them elsewhere — without any bugs, just two button clicks. You can create pages and import them into other sites in one click, easily make backups, or add a module from one page to another by simply saving it to your library. Very convenient.
- Built-in A/B testing. Who else offers that?
As you can tell, Divi is ideal for building a site with WordPress.
Divi theme summary
Competition is fierce in the WordPress theme and page builder space — and Divi is genuinely one of the best on the market. Straightforward, not expensive. You can even start with the 1-year subscription at $89, then upgrade to the lifetime plan at $161 instead of $250 (saving $89). Divi is a must-know and an excellent choice. In fact, if you know what you’re doing in web creation, it only has one real drawback: the theme itself is still too heavy…
I give it a score of 8.5/10. Be warned: !